Clean Air: A Fallout Tale
by ShiftWithTheWind
Summary: Two oddball kids with defiant dreams and the guts to make them happen, Levi and Hanji strike a fateful friendship in a post-nuclear apocalypse. Vault 104 is all they've ever known. But their bright futures won't stay locked in the dark forever. "We're going to get out of this place. Together. And we're never coming back." Rated T for language. Image by airefee.
1. Part One

**Part One.**

Pine-Sol dominated Levi's earliest memories of Vault 104, the Aerial Industry Reserve (A.I.R.) The boy woke up to the smell of Pine-Sol every day because his alarm was set at the exact time that the robot cleaning crew swept through the hall outside his room. He breathed in the smell, imagined it coating his uniform, seeping into his body and turning his blood to bleach.

A sign in the hall read: A.I.R. KEEPS YOU CLEAN SO YOU CAN BREATHE CLEAN AIR!

Early mornings, Levi's mom spent forty-five minutes washing his pale skin until it was red, combing his black hair (trimming it added another ten minutes) and dressing him. Once, Levi asked her if he could pick his clothes. She ignored him. He looked in their closet later; every uniform looked the same - a peach red jumpsuit with A.I.R. 104 printed on the back and front. They all smelled like detergent.

Everything Levi smelled in A.I.R. had that scrubbed, clean smell - in the community dining hall, the library, the learning center, the sports center, the shopping center, and especially in the doctor's office and dentist office.

Levi complained about the dentist one month. Mom frowned and brought up his reading lessons in school. He said he was better at it than all the other kids. She pointed to a sign on the office wall and told him to read it. He tried, silently, with difficulty, because she wouldn't help him. A few appointments later, he was still trying. Six months after being told to read the sign, he got it. "Monthly appointments with your doctor and dentist are mandated by Vault Protocol 7 Section B under the Health and Safety Agreement."

"What's that mean?" he asked Mom, while she was working in the community kitchen.

"It means you have to go with Mommy to the doctor and dentist every month and that's final."

"Why?"

She slapped a hand on the counter. "Because we need to be clean and this god-forsaken planet is a radiated piece of filth, god! Stop asking questions, you know I hate that."

* * *

><p>Levi was six years old and furious because one of the kids had torn up his crayon drawing during recess. He'd drawn a picture of the outdoors, with lush earth and sky, and he'd been very particular with the grass blades and the bugs. Now it was just shredded paper that the teacher had told him to clean up.<p>

He marched up the neon yellow-striped steps and made for the giant, circular door with the word EXIT printed on it. Suddenly a big, Velcro-gloved hand pushed him and he stared up at a guard's mirror sunglasses.

"Whoa there, little tyke, where do you think you're going?"

"I'm leaving this stupid place," Levi growled.

"No you're not, little guy. Nobody leaves A.I.R."

"I'm leaving!" He resisted the large hand pushing on his chest and shoulder.

"You turn right around and get back to your living cell, kid." The guard turned to his partner and muttered something. Levi caught the words, "...need to question his parents."

"Why can't I leave?" the six-year-old demanded, pouting.

"Because then the mutant monsters will gobble you up. Now move along, and don't come back here, understand?"

He looked at them, fully equipped in vests and helmets, guns and wands strapped to their waists. They were so big and unmoving.

His mom yelled at him that night. He never tried to leave by that door again.

* * *

><p>In fourth grade, Levi's classes became one viewing after another of instructional movies. He sat in the back, so the teacher wouldn't catch him nodding off in the darkness. The tinny music and corny narration about the Resource Wars grew easier and easier to ignore. Even the loud parts stopped jolting him awake, when footage of nuclear fallout blew up on the projector.<p>

He never remembered anything from the movies, but instead learned and memorized things he read in books from the A.I.R. library. He stayed up all night nose-deep in a book about vacuum tube technology or the development of the first nuclear-run car. Then he fell asleep during class, because why to pay attention to some dumbass factoid he already knew about three class days ago?

"What is this?" Mom asked him sternly one evening, when she held up a report card marked in ominous red. "I'm going to talk to your teacher."

She did. Nothing happened. Teachers said things. He didn't remember. He liked the books better. They made sense. They were interesting. And they didn't talk down to him or give him looks.

* * *

><p>One day when Levi was ten, his life coach told the class in her perkiest, most encouraging tone, "I want everyone to tell me what they'd like to be when they grow up."<p>

Almost all the kids said, "I want to be a doctor."

"Lab scientist!"

"Dentist!"

"Nurse!"

"And you, Levi?" the coach pressed, when it was his turn and he didn't speak up. "What do you want to be? Share with the class."

"I want to be an airplane pilot," he said, grey eyes fixed sullenly on the floor. "And I'd fly one of the planes we keep here."

"Why?" demanded one of the other boys. "That's dumb. You can't fly a plane in the vault."

"Then I'd fly it outside, dumbass," Levi said, glaring up at him.

"You can't go outside! That's wrong and you'll get in trouble! Teacher he said-!"

"All right, all right class, I think that's enough sharing for now," the teacher said, her voice cautious. She gave Levi a strange look.

Then he saw another girl in class looking at him, a girl with a messy brown pony tail and huge glasses. He'd never seen someone look at him like that before, like they understood him...like he had something they desperately wanted.


	2. Part Two

**Part Two.**

Levi didn't know the bright-eyed girl's name, even though he'd seen her every day in school since kindergarten. He didn't talk to her because boys didn't talk to girls in A.I.R. Even his mom and dad followed that rule.

After Levi foolishly told everyone his life dream, the pony-tail girl followed him out of the classroom and down the hall. Hair bouncing wildly on her shoulders, she closed in on him as they were reaching the cafeteria.

"Flyboy," she hissed, and he startled. He caught a daring smile on her freckled mouth. "I'm Hanji."

"Call me Levi," he said, frowning at her. "What do you want, Four-Eyes?"

She just grinned. "Do you know how to get to the robot bunker on Level 7A?"

Levi nodded, understanding.

"Meet me there after school, 4:30 sharp." Biting her lip, Hanji broke from him swift as a bird taking flight and disappeared into the crowd.

He stared after her, not sure how to react. He thought about it as he joined the lunch line, letting the robot dispensers give him his complete gluten-free meal, and then sat alone thinking about it as he ate. His thoughts were so caught up in meeting Hanji, he didn't notice the group of clench-fisted, sneering shadows following him out of the cafeteria.

He heard their footsteps, and bolted. Voices cussed at his back and tennis shoes pounded on linoleum. Hands grabbed the back of his uniform and then three boys had him pinned against the wall.

Levi kept his head bowed, bracing himself, but they didn't hesitate. He was smacked into the wall one second and the next his stomach and ribs were exposed to their blows. Little fists punched him again, again, and again, and then again just as he thought they'd stopped. Levi's small body convulsed with each hit, until his legs buckled and he slid down, averting eye contact. Battered lungs sucked in ragged breaths. Gritted teeth and bloody lips stayed silent.

The three shadows laughed. "Try to fly a stupid plane now," one of them jeered. "Dumbass."

* * *

><p>"Ouch," Hanji said, when she saw Levi limp into the Level 7A Robot Stationary Bunker at four-thirty.<p>

She sat on the floor, surrounded by eerily green-lit robot pods and their nests of wires. She had her backpack and its stuff was spilled out on the floor next to her - dozens of paper drawings and pencils and markers. He stared at the sight, eyes widening when he noticed her clothing. She wore rose pink shorts and a short-sleeved shirt with a rainbow diamond pattern.

"Where did you get those clothes?" he asked.

"I made them. Do you like them? You're the first one to see me wear them." She grinned boldly. "I have others, and I'm designing more outfits, see?" She waved him over to look at her stuff.

He walked over and gingerly sat down, looking at her collection. Hanji was still talking. She said she told everyone in the class she wanted to be a doctor, but that was a lie; she really wanted to be an architect and make houses so that everyone could live outside again. She showed him all her building designs, maps, and whole imaginary cities.

"I've never shown any of these to anybody," she said, giving him that grin of hers again. Her glasses gleamed in the room's greenish light.

"Why show them to me?" Levi asked, finally getting a word in.

"I think it's cool that you want to be an airplane pilot," Hanji said, "Oh and if you tell anyone about what I showed you, I'll beat you up worse than those boys did."

"You could try, Glasses."

"And we'd stop being friends forever."

He raised an eyebrow at her. "Friends?"

"Or else," she said, looking at him very seriously. She lowered her voice. "I wouldn't come to you unless I absolutely needed a friend. And I do. I have plans and they aren't going to work if I'm all by myself."

"What plans?" he asked, voice hushed even lower.

"Secret plans," she whispered, "I don't trust you enough yet to reveal them. I'm not stupid."

He wasn't about to say otherwise. Sitting cross legged next to her, he looked at her drawings, closely inspecting each and every one. "I can keep a secret," he said. "Promise."

She smiled, and leaned back to look at him, noting his uniform was too big for him. They didn't have his size in men's. "Do you want me to make you some clothes?"

For some reason, Levi blushed.

* * *

><p>Hanji and Levi exchanged PIP (Personal Information Processor) IDs, and messaged each other whenever one of them wanted to meet in that same place after school. She usually pinged him, because every week she had a new design to show him, or a new outfit, or a new conspiracy. He never had anything to share with her, but Hanji didn't mind. Every time they talked, Levi felt like he'd stepped under a fresh spring, bubbling out of the earth. She constantly said, "I've never told anyone this before but..." and three hours later she finally stopped, but only because it wasn't safe for them to meet for any longer than that. Parents asked questions, or worse, guards would find them.<p>

On weekends, they sneaked into the lower maintenance levels to take shots at radroaches with Hanji's bb gun. Other days, they sneaked into the A.I.R. hangers to see the vacuous rooms of aluminum treasure - the disassembled planes, stored by the hundreds. The two of them stood on the catwalks erected over the area, gazing down on rows and rows of bubble-wrapped parts.

"You'll fly one of them one day," Hanji said with her special grin. "You'll fly me out of here. We'll never see this stupid vault ever again."

"There's supposed to be at least a hundred models stored here," Levi said. "Tch. This vault was built to keep all these planes, but it's against the rules to use them."

"Fuck the rules," Hanji said, blowing a wavy strand of hair out of her face.

Those words made Levi smile for once.

* * *

><p>"Levi, I want you to be honest with me." Mom turned off Levi's radio show and made him sit on the couch with her. "Are you spending time with Hanji Zoe?"<p>

He tensed, saying nothing for a moment.

"Levi you need to answer me."

"Yes," he said in a low voice. "I hang out with her after school."

"What do you do together?"

"Stuff."

Mom sighed, holding Levi's shoulders for a moment. "You need to be careful around that girl. Her family is very troubled and I think they need help."

"I'm helping Hanji," Levi said, crossing his arms and looking at a paint scratch on the wall.

"Are you friends?"

"Yes," he murmured, relishing the word in his mouth.

She sighed again. "Please be careful, Levi. I don't think she's a very good friend for you."


	3. Part Three

**Part Three.**

It was two weeks after Levi's twelfth birthday, a Friday night and he was up in his bed, covers draped over him and flashlight beaming down on his present from Hanji. It was a spiral notebook full of pictures, drawings and factoids about airplanes. She'd drawn the illustrations herself and cut photos out of magazines from the library. ("There's hundreds of them, who will ever notice?") Delicately Levi turned the pages, eyes glued to the material.

His PIP pinged and he glanced at the message, expecting to meet Hanji tomorrow.

The text blinked on his screen: _Come to the meeting place right now._

He frowned, pulled up the onscreen keyboard and rapidly typed his response. _It's after curfew, we can't meet now._

Seconds later: _Fuck curfew and come!_

Then: _Now!_

He closed his book and flung the covers aside. Hanji kept pinging him. He yanked out his secret drawer of outfits and found his favorite blue corduroys and black shirt that had the word "Flyboy" embroidered on it. Another birthday present, which he'd begrudged at first, but like most things from Hanji, the shirt and nickname grew on him.

_I'm on my way, _he messaged her, so that his PIP would stop making so much noise.

Sneaking out after curfew was nothing new to Levi; he'd long learned how to avoid the guards. He made it to Level 7A quickly, practically running into the robot station. "Hanji?"

"I'm over here," she said, and he heard the catch in her voice. She was leaning against one of the robot pods, arms crossed and head cast downward. It was hard to see her, half in the dark, half in the dim green light from the pod.

Levi paused in his step. "What's wrong?"

She waved him over, and he could hear her breathing hard, biting back something. He didn't want to believe it, but he knew tears when he heard them. He got close. He saw the bruises on her face. Her glasses were missing. Hot, strangling knots started to choke Levi's own throat. Rage had a way of hurting your voice.

"Who hurt you? You better tell me," he said, voice deadly low. "I'll reshape their face."

"Flyboy to the rescue," Hanji drawled bitterly. "Don't be an idiot. I'm not..." she sniffed, wiping her eyes, "...not here to cry and ask you to save me or anything. I'm fine and of perfectly sound mind."

"Bullshit." Levi fought to keep his voice level. "You're hurt. I'm going to fucking do something about it."

"We both are." Hanji said forcefully, looking him straight in the eye. She swallowed the last of her tears.

"Good," Levi said, "So tell me who the asshole is and we'll get him."

"The asshole is my dad," she said flatly, "And I have a much better idea."

He looked at her expectantly, sobered by her answer. Hanji took a deep breath, and took her glasses out of her pocket. When she put them on she looked completely herself again. Bold brown eyes stared seriously at Levi and she reached for his hand.

"Remember when we first met here and I told you I had secret plans? I'm going to tell them to you now, because I trust you, and more importantly, I'm going to put it all into action, very soon."

"You're escaping A.I.R., aren't you?" Levi said.

She smiled, though it looked like it hurt her black and blue cheek. "So much for secret plan, huh?" She leaned close to him, close enough that he could smell her shampoo and his skin flushed hot. She was still clutching his hand. Grey and brown eyes locked on each other.

"We're going to get out of this place," Hanji vowed, "Together. And we're never coming back. Swear on it." She broke her hand from his for a moment and spat in her palm before holding it out to shake.

He recoiled. "Gross."

"Do it, pansy," she snapped.

He spat in his palm and shook. "How and when do we start?"

* * *

><p>The plan was genius, as Hanji put it.<p>

"_Operation Pilot plays out in three stages. One: preparation. We'll start the day just like normal and go to school, but when we get to our first class we'll fake sick and ask to go to the nurse. Sick checks take forever so no one will miss us. We'll ping each other when we're out and then head straight to the community kitchen and bust into the pantry."_

Like mice, the two kids poked their heads into the kitchen, saw it was empty, then darted for their target. The pantry door was locked.

"No worries. I've been practicing for this," Hanji said in a low voice, showing Levi her lock picks. Two minutes later, they opened the door to shelves and shelves of goods. Packages and cans were stacked so high that Levi craned his neck to see the distant top. He blinked as Hanji shoved a piece of paper in his hands.

"Get everything on the list," she ordered, "And don't forget the chocolate." She opened her backpack to pull out several more backpacks. He did the same and got to work.

"Are you sure this will be enough?" he asked, as he packed the seventh bag of Wheaties Bars Made With Super Wheat.

"It's as much as we can take," Hanji said, zipping up a stuffed backpack. She frowned at him, watching as he looked longingly at all the food, food he could eat for the rest of his life if he stayed. "Hey. Flyboy. You better not be thinking of bailing out now."

He looked sharply at her. "Of course not, Four-Eyes. I said I'd come with you, and I'm coming."

"Great!" With a fierce smile, she stuffed a handful of goodies in her bag. "Had me worried for a second. Now hurry up!"

"_Stage two is distraction. We have to get down to Level 7, room 13 without anyone catching us. We won't look like lost school kids anymore with all our bags of food, so I came up with a way to keep all the guards busy."_

Levi closed the kitchen doors, then looked at Hanji. She had a plastic half-gallon container full of swishing liquid, and she held it up with a wicked gleam in her glasses.

"What's that?" Levi asked warily, taking a step back.

"Just wait and see," Hanji said, and pointed. "We have to go left. So..." She walked some distance down the hall to the right and put the container in the middle of the floor. Then she ran springing back to Levi's side and brandished her bb gun. "Watch this." She winked, aimed, and fired.

Levi heard the pop of the bb pellet breaking the half-gallon open. Then a high pitched squeak pierced the hall and the container exploded. BANG!

"Shit!" Levi shielded his head with his hands, staring. Plastic shrapnel and liquid sprayed the walls, an acrid smell and steam flooding the air.

"I made it!" Hanji said, wearing a wild smile from ear to ear, "With cleaning supplies! Look!" She showed him a whole backpack full of them.

The alarms blasted off, red strobe lights flashing over their faces. Hand in hand, Levi and Hanji dashed down the hall, as voices started calling down the corridors and someone blew a whistle.

"_And for the grand finale, we get to the room where they build the robots for survey missions outside. We're going to escape through the tube system they use to send the robots up! We're just small enough to get in one of the pods. It'll be a sinch, if we can just get there."_

"Shit, they're coming!" Levi's shoes beat the floor.

"Keep going! Here!" Hanji jerked him down the stairs, pushed him ahead and turned around. She aimed at the container she'd planted behind them and fired. BANG!

Levi heard someone scream. His heart skipped a beat, thudding in his ears.

"Whoo! We're almost there!" Hanji yelled.

"_You go up the tubes first, and then I'll follow. And we'll be out. Bada bing, bada boom, Flyboy."_

Room 13 hummed and shook with machinery. Wires snaked across the floor. Along the back wall were the tubes, reaching up and beyond the ceiling like giant organ pipes. Little robots were packed into pods and arranged around the tubes. It would be easy to pick one up, place it in the tube opening and then just push the red button on the control panel. With a hiss the pod would shoot upward to the surface.

Hanji flipped a pod over, dumping its contents. With Levi's help, she moved it into the tube, then practically threw him into the seat. He had to crouch to fit. One by one she stuffed the backpacks in with him.

"Oy, Shit-Glasses, I'm suffocating!"

"Just for a few seconds! That's how long it takes to get to the surface."

Doors banged open. "Hey!" cried a man's voice.

Hanji whirled, and through her legs, Levi saw two guards running into the room. He saw helmets and vests and guns.

"Surprise!" Hanji shouted back, and raised her bb gun. Then Levi saw it - the bomb Hanji had left by the door. She pulled the trigger.

BANG!

Levi winced, startled by the gunshot. His ears rang. He blinked as he saw Hanji fall. Red pooled on her chest, staining the turquoise blue of her shirt and soaking through the white thread of her embroidered stars. He stared, then looked up as he heard one of the guards drop his gun, cussing, shaking from head to toe.

"Holy fuck, I shot her, I fucking shot her dead, dear god..."

The plastic half-gallon bomb just sat there, the men just stood there, and Hanji just lay there. Her shirt slowly changed color.

"Hey kid, get out of that pod! Get out of there right now!"

Levi saw them rushing forward. He saw Hanji on the floor, motionless, her bb gun and two backpacks dropped beside her.

Swiftly he reached and managed to snatch the gun. As he retreated back into the pod he punched the red button. Plastic screening closed down, squishing him. The guards ran into the pod, hands smacking on the plastic and open-mouthed faces staring. Then they vanished, a rushing filled Levi's ears, and blackness swallowed him up. He was being crushed, flatter and flatter, closer and closer. Lights flashed in front of his eyes and he heard a whirring whine, increasing in volume until it seemed to explode in his head.

Suddenly it stopped.

Tears streamed down Levi's face. He gasped for air. It was hot, and smelled, and tasted like nothing he'd ever breathed before.

...

...

**Fin**


End file.
